In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin

He was a creep

I am perhaps tardy in talking about the death of Roger Ailes. They say don’t speak ill of the dead. Yet what can I say that’s good about a man who had no redeeming qualities? Other than, “He’s dead. Good.”

It is perhaps appropriate that Roger Ailes’s introduction to politics was via Richard Nixon in 1967. Richard Nixon was a twisted man who required a corkscrew to put his boots on in the morning, and Ailes and Nixon got along with each other like macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, slime and slugs. Nixon was evil in the way of insecure men with a desire for power and no moral scruples, but Ailes was evil just because. Ailes was a master of the Big Lie, never letting the truth out of its barn if a lie would do, because he didn’t care about polluting the body politic with fake news to keep people confused and uncertain — all he cared about was corrupting the public discourse so that evil could win. As such, he led the media propaganda efforts of Nixon and Reagan and Bush 1, then met, finally, someone who was both evil and rich enough to make his ultimate dream come true. I am talking, of course, about Rupert Murdoch, who sadly still walks this earth despite making Richard Nixon look like an honest man.

Ailes was a creep, a serial molester of women, a serial molester of the truth. When he convinced Murdoch to fund his Fox News Network, he un-ironically proclaimed it to be “Fair and Balanced” at every point in time, where “fair” meant both falsehood and truth was given equal crdibility, and “balanced” meant that both good and evil were given moral equivalence. He polluted the public discourse to the point where frothing white snowflake MAGAts truly believed that there were evil Communist Liberals out there whose sole goal was to exterminate the white race, something which any reasonable person would simply laugh at, but after two decades of concerted propaganda there were few reasonable people on that side of the bench, only true believers who believed every lie that Ailes had his network present. Every morning, every single person at Fox News Network got the day’s talking points from Ailes. Their job was to reiterate those talking points, over and over again, repeating the Big Lie over and over until it became not something incredibly racist and venal and evil but, rather, became normal. Normalizing evil was the thing that Ailes loved to do, and the results can be seen on every Youtube video that attracts attention from the rightward side of the political spectrum, and every newspaper comments section, where people spew evil as if it were simply common wisdom, and it’s the people *not* spewing evil who are attacked and marginalized.

It is too bad there is not a Hell, for if there was, Ailes would certainly be condemned to inhabit it for the rest of eternity for his work in the service of evil. But there is not a Hell, and so all we can do is talk about the evil that Ailes did — an evil that will far outlast his worm-eaten body, alas, an evil that has the potential, in all likelihood, to destroy the nation and the world itself.

That is Roger Ailes. He was a creep. And evil. Let us never forget that.

– Badtux the Obituaries Penguin

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10 Responses

The people who’ve listened 7/24/365, were changed, since they were being told The Real Truth. Trapped within the bubble Ailes created, they repeated what they were told, and heard the echoes from friends of what was daily pronounced until it became reality for them. Perception is reality, and for them, everyone not ‘them’ was to be treated with distrust and fear, since everyone else was lying to them. There are a few people I no longer associate with, due to the changes Fox and its radio handmaidens wrought. I’m sad for these changes, but I cannot undo them, so I have to move on.
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When the next civil war breaks out in Amerika (I expect it within my lifetime, and I’m getting on the oldish side) I hope the survivors will say “Ailes made this.” Sadly, Roger and Rupes didn’t strap anyone to a chair and force-feed them their sewage, a la “Clockwork Orange.” There were shitloads of Amerikkkans who sucked the filth like it was tittymilk. scAiles and Mordorch were the keys, but millions of Merkins gladly opened the door to the hell they created.

It is human nature for people to look for scapegoats when their situation is not good. Ailes’s talent was creating scapegoats out of thin air, in much the same way that Goebbels scapegoated Jews and socialists and Communists for the failure of Germany in WW1. Ailes and Goebbels were two peas in a pod, happily corrupting the public discourse in service to evil. Thing is, Goebbels was doing so in order to get his man Hitler elected. Ailes did so just because. So who was more evil, then?

FWIW (and being a true wussy liberal who looks at all sides), Ailes had an incredibly abusive childhood that must have played a part in the monster he became. From WaPo:
“At one point, the young Roger was standing on the top of his bunk bed, and his father opened his arms wide and urged him to jump. The boy did so, but his father took a step back, and Ailes landed hard on the floor. “Robert leaned down,” Sherman writes, “and picked him up. ‘Don’t ever trust anybody,’ he said.”
…and..
“If the boys ignored their father’s demands for quiet around the house, “he pulled out his belt, whipping them not until they began to cry, although they did wail, but until they fell silent,” Sherman writes. He quotes Ailes’s brother as saying, “He did like to beat the [expletive] out of you with that belt. He continued to beat and he continued to beat you. . . . It was a pretty routine fixture of childhood. . . . If we stopped crying, he’d go away. He wanted it quiet.”
More:https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/roger-ailes-bio-claims-fox-news-chief-orchestrated-anti-obama-video/2014/01/13/7794405a-7c70-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html

Like the child abuse victims who grow up to become paedophiles (or Cathoholic priests — but I repeat myself) themselves…

After I learned that Ailes had haemophilia from a news story several years ago, I was even more surprised he didn’t have empathy for the unfortunates in life. If anyone should have been a bleeding heart liberal, it shoulda been a bleeder.

sdean7855, most abuse victims do *not* themselves go on to be abusers. It is in fact a small minority who do, though a larger percentage than of the public at large. Furthermore, having dealt with abused children before on a professional basis, the abuse caused some serious issues and may have made them more likely to abuse their own children but it did not make them evil. Evil is a different thing altogether, and Ailes had it.

“We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.”

Fucking A. I could see the long-term decline in my mother’s humanity via what Taibbi wrote. As well as my own snobbish leftist hatering, unfortunately, because I’m as nastily factional as any reich-winger. Although I like to think my scornful prejudices are more reality-based than theirs. But I would, wouldn’t I?